Old School celebrates a re-engagement with Old Master modes of representation, which might be said to be a recent phenomenon in contemporary art. A younger generation of artists looks to the past in works that re-define and re-contextualize the techniques, themes, and imagery of their art-historical predecessors, and Old School aims to present a dialogue between old and new with a selection of works spanning the 15th to the 21st centuries.

*Each of the younger artists in this exhibition presents a unique approach to history. By adopting the iconographies, graphic rhythms and techniques of Lucas Cranach, John Currin’s paintings from the mid to late nineties graft a historical complexity and painterly panache to the provocatively unnatural female bodies that feature in his paintings. Artists such as Currin, Anj Smith, and Djordje Ozbolt consciously make use of classic compositions of genre, history and landscape painting so that their images recall past artworks, while mining the gap between current sensibilities and those of previous times. This observance of different moments of time within a single image is also explored in Hilary Harkness’ complex paintings, which conflate episodes from history a contemporary extravagance, and in the works of Richard Wathen whose portraits are chilling distillations of all of a person’s ages into one.

*While technical dexterity is a characteristic of many of the works in the exhibition, the attitudes displayed towards the art of the past vary tremendously. While some of the contemporary artists’ homages to old master work is spiked with ambivalence, the work of Berlinde de Bruyckere, in contrast, returns to timeless materials to treat age-old subject matters with warmth and sincerity. Moreover, Glenn Brown’s and Anj Smith’s superficial resemblances to old and iconic works give way to stylistic innovation.

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In Old Master and contemporary works alike, theatricality and storytelling are fully-indulged. Allegories can be read and opinions pronounced through chance details and exaggerated and idealized forms. Sentimentality, humor and role-playing is evident in works such as Jakub Julian Ziolkowski’s Great Battle Under the Table and Julie Heffernan’s Self Portrait as a Tender Mercenary, while it is the dowdily-dressed people that inhabit Christopher Orr’s Brueghel-like landscapes that give his paintings their strangeness. Like Orr, Borremans, Peyton, Kilimnik, and Raedecker all weave grim and fabulous fairy-tales out of the conjoining of modern-day realities with elements and styles that point nostalgically to the past.

"My childhood never lost its magic, never lost its mystery, and never lost its drama."

Her father would draw Louise Bourgeois' outline on the skin of a tangerine and cut it in the shape of a naked girl. When he finished, he would mock: "Look, Louise does not have anything there...." However, her father, in competition with her mother, bought her clothes, such as the ermine collar and hat which were not appreciated by the four-year-old child. Today, this behavior is interpreted by the artist as the loss of innocence. On October 25,1923, Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary: "I wake up late and go to Paris with Father who is going to buy me a coat, another coat and a hat of leather ".

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Louise Bourgeois was the middle child, between her sister and her brother. This position gave her a sense of instability. Unresolved conflicts and ambiguous memories from childhood were retained as memories of a family in which the mother was the protective figure. The father, the authoritarian figure, became the lover of Sadie, the family's tutor. Science debates how the death of a father impacts a person's psychological structure or maybe this is mere fiction created by ethnologists. Bourgeois leads us to ambiguous and conflicting images of her father as in The Destruction of the Father (1974). The family home, the network of relationships among the members of the family, and the child's anguish make up the "childhood motivations" which are the basis of her art. "The corpus of my work," stated Louise Bourgeois, "is adjusted to my recurrent identification with Eugénie Grandet, a Balzac character, who was never given a chance to grow up and the daughter in Père Goriot, who never grew up. "

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"Father would go with Pierre and me to the school full of boys, watched me .... I got dressed in the afternoon and went to play under the cherry trees. Sadie and I were wearing father's pants."

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Her father had a tapestry restoration business, a craft which acquires a symbolic meaning in her work. The sewing room was the ideal place to discover secrets, such as sex, which were denied her. While she mended Mr. Bourgeois' pants, the seamstress answered the questions raised by young Louise about the parts of the body. The garment codes were the rules of desire. Therefore, in this house, the seamstress and the mistress managed sensuality.*

Analogous with the blades used to mend tapestries, the guillotine is a symbol of the physical time of instantaneousness. The fabric of the childhood relationships, symbolized by the family home in the work Choisy, is cut like a memory, in the abrupt falling of the guillotine's blade. "The present guillotines the past," she concludes. In a new Choisy, Bourgeois created another kind of execution, an old electric chair which "had became a useless object, since it is no longer used." Bourgeois reasons, "This radical form of punishment emerged in the fight between two men over a woman. Thus, the brothers became rivals in the crime of passion. It goes beyond reason. It is insanity, itself." Art guarantees sanity, she once wrote.

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"I am a scientific person. I believe in psychoanalysis, in philosophy. For me the only thing that matters is the tangible." Louise Bourgeois developed a logic of instincts and it is important to link her art to the greater themes of knowledge or literature, rather than to the systems of art. It is better to speak about materials extracted from repression, the life struggles as abandonment and anger, desire and aggression, communication and the inaccessibility of the Other. In the constant confrontation between the instincts of death, anguish, fear and the instincts of life, the work of Louise Bourgeois is a painful and triumphant affirmation of existence illuminated by the libido. In this biographical and erotic work, to transform materials into art is a physical conversion, not in the religious sense, but like the conversion of electricity into power, she affirmed.

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In the XXIII Bienal Internacional de São Paulo, Louise Bourgeois showed a series of works in which she debates femininity. Unlike her father's business of mending tapestries, a spider weaves its web. The huge Spider signifies labor, giving, protection and foresight. The potency of the web is in either welcoming or entangling us as if we were prey. "Domesticity is very important. I think it is overwhelming. It has to be practical, patient and skilled." The affectionate memory of motherhood is present in several sculptures. The fertile, generous and working woman was already present in such works as Woman with Packages and Breasted Woman, or more recently in Nature Study, Pink Fountain. In a 1986 drawing, of a mother and a daughter, a large pair of scissors protects a smaller pair. Here are both protection and menace, as well as the cutting of the umbilical cord. "My knives are like a tongue-I love, I do not love, I hate. If you don't love me, I am ready to attack. I am a double-edged knife."Fallen Woman shows an unstable body facing gravity, like the unpredictability of desire. Femme Couteaumay be the piece which opened the way for Giacometti's Femme Égorgée. It is the blade which mutilates and beheads, activating fantasies of castration.

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In Louise Bourgeois' work, we are often faced with the presence of subjects who desire, and who desire sexually . They are not immediate figures of desire but they position themselves clearly as operations of desire. Bourgeois' vengeance on the constraints of the "wish to know" is to create the disorder of the forbidden. The right to know is my birth right. We also find an abundance of phallic Venuses and Venusian phalluses, like Fillette, Harmless Woman , or Fragile Goddess. They are ancestral images in the story of mankind and of the provisions of sexuality. Louise Bourgeois unveils men as Picasso unveiled women. However, the actuality of desire makes dispenses with myths.

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Some of Bourgeois' sculptures seem to exhale the sweat of erotic work. Others have extremely tactile forms, like the sensuality found in Degas' sculptures. Mamelles, a colony of rubber breasts, speaks of a calculated symbolic reference. The eroticism of matter acts as the freeing of libidinous energy. If we speak of the plasticity of the libido, Bourgeois' work seems to be a phantasmagoric conversion of physical energy into libidinal energy. The work imposes itself with such physical presence that it requires a hepatic view, the possibility and desire for an erotic touch. The world of Bourgeois' sculptures is that of tangibility. In opposition to Mamelles stand End of Softness and Trani Episode, with their sensual shapes of breasts in bronze or stone. All oral erotic appeal of the shapes is abruptly broken by the end of malleability, by the loss of organicism in the cold temperature and in solid matter.

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In the artist's studio, we found practical manuals (The New Dressmaker, La Revolte des Passements, Manuel Méthodique et Pratique de Couture et de Coupe), organized according to their size, as if they were the articulation of concepts, methods, and an order of sculpture. They are books on the science of tailoring, and sculpturing is to cut in three dimensions, states the artist. As diagrams of the body and living memories, the clothing emerges in her prhase: "To me, a sculpture is the body. My body is my sculpture." The fabric is a skein of threads and a producer of eroticism. Structure and unreason articulate the weave, the fashion design, the architecture which uses reinforced concrete, the manufacture and work of garments, and seduction.

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"This is not mere 'parole antique.' I work with the present. Eternal, universal and ever-present emotions. Especially the emotions of violence, jealousy and fear." "The most eternal present is a perfume by Gerlain", says Louise Bourgeois, as she opens an empty flask.

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A Louise Bourgeois Interview by Paulo Herkenhoff

Art Minimal & Conceptual Only

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Crítica:

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Louise Bourgeois has created a variety of works in a series that she calls "Nature Studies". These works range from strange hermaphroditic animals to disembodied body parts. She is drawn to body parts that are especially vulnerable, such as eyes. (...)

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One of Bourgeois' earliest major sculptures, C.O.Y:O.T.E., and two related pieces, both titled "The BlindLeading the Blind" were begun in 1941, when increased studio space gave the artist the opportunity to work on a large scale for the first time. (...)

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Stemming from her interest in the physical, emotional, and psychological aspects of pain and fear, Bourgeois was drawn to "the arch of hysteria" as theorized and represented by the nineteenth-century neurologist Jean Martin Charcot (1825-1893). (...)